It's been some years now but I used to culture mysids and sell to other hobbyists and one store. After a couple of years though, I quit doing it because first of all, to do it in any meaning full numbers it is very labour intensive and second, because it was labour intensive I charged $1 per mysid (which was $.25 less than stores here charged at the time) and that in itself narrowed the market tremendously.
I started off by removing mysids from my reef tanks for the starter cultures, placing them in Rubbermaid storage tubs I had lying around that I filled the bottoms with rock rubble to give hiding places for the mysid nauplii. It took some time but the population got to harvest numbers and to harvest I used a small powerhead to blast the rubble to force the mysids into the water column where I scooped them up with a mesh net large enough to get the adults but allow for the nauplii to pass through. Biggest problem I had was after some time, the increasingly built up detritus in the rubble got blown up as well and I had to do a further separation for the final harvest. The harvestable numbers from two Rubbermaids (I think they were about 15-20g but don't really remember now) would not sustain a pair of seahorses on it's own but was a good source of a secondary food. As word got around, I had people wanting to buy them so I ended up researching and expanding.
I progressed to making a mysid generator based on the one that MBL Aquatics had posted on their website at the time, (no longer there) using a 20g tank. However, due to the cannibalistic practices of the mysids, I had to have 10 ten gallon tanks to be able to keep the progressive sizes separated as even only minor differences in size meant the larger ate the smaller.
As you can see, the workload was intensive when you also had to keep all these tanks clean and what started out was an enthusiastic adventure turned into a laborious task.
reefs.com
